DHS’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) — the internal watchdog overseeing the department’s activities — released a report on what I’ve dubbed the Biden-Harris administration’s “CBP One app interview scheme”. It allows 1,450 “undocumented noncitizens” per day to schedule appointments using the CBP One app, nearly all of whom are then paroled into the United States. The OIG identified significant issues with that scheme, which impact not only security but the aliens themselves — and raised even more troubling questions.
CBP One App Interview Scheme, in Brief. On January 5, 2023, the White House issued a fact sheet titled “Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Border Enforcement Actions”, which announced that:
When Title 42 eventually lifts, noncitizens located in Central and Northern Mexico seeking to enter the United States lawfully through a U.S. port of entry have access to the CBP One mobile application for scheduling an appointment to present themselves for inspection and to initiate a protection claim instead of coming directly to a port of entry to wait. This new feature will significantly reduce wait times and crowds at U.S. ports of entry and allow for safe, orderly, and humane processing.
There are many misstatements of fact in that excerpt, beginning with the claim that would-be illegal migrants would only be able to schedule appointments for interviews at the border ports of entry once “Title 42 lifted” on May 11, 2023.
That program had already been ongoing on a limited basis when that fact sheet was issued, as my colleague Todd Bensman revealed months earlier, but as the OIG report notes, it went live for all would-be migrants just a week after that fact sheet was issued, on January 12.
Moreover, the assertion that CBP One app users are “noncitizens” who are “seeking to enter the United States lawfully through a U.S. port of entry” is Kafkaesque. By definition, all are “undocumented” in that they lack the documents — visas and passports — needed to be admitted to the United States lawfully.
Which likely explains the biggest fib in that so-called “fact sheet”: The purpose of this scheme is not so much to “allow for safe, orderly, and humane” processing as it is to hide ongoing illegal migration at the Southwest border.
In any event, CBP currently makes 1,450 CBP One daily interview appointments available to those aliens, and not just for migrants in “Central and Northern Mexico”, but also for ones at the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala, too.
As of the end of July, more than 765,000 illegal migrants have made appointments at the ports using CBP One, and congressional disclosures reveal that nearly 96 percent of CBP One migrants have been paroled into the United States — where they will remain indefinitely, if not forever.
“CBP Did Not Thoroughly Plan for CBP One Risks”. The latest OIG report is captioned “CBP Did Not Thoroughly Plan for CBP One Risks, and Opportunities to Implement Improvements Exist”, and you’ll quickly realize that is a drastic understatement.
Here is the key excerpt from that report:
CBP may be missing an opportunity to use CBP One™ advance information to improve pre-arrival vetting procedures. Although CBP uses biographic and biometric information submitted into CBP One™ in advance to determine whether arriving noncitizens have derogatory records, it does not leverage the information to identify suspicious trends as part of its pre-arrival vetting procedures. Based on our analysis of CBP One™ data, we identified potentially unrelated noncitizens who repeatedly claimed identical intended U.S. residences. CBP currently does not have a mechanism to routinely analyze CBP One™ data submitted across the eligible POEs for trends, which may be useful intelligence to help guide front-line CBP officers when interviewing noncitizens during appointment processing.
Ignore the weasel words in the first sentence while I explain the rest.
The CBP One Scheduling, Vetting, and Interview Process. The Biden-Harris administration hasn’t offered much transparency into that CBP One interview process, but fortunately OIG lays it out for all to see in a 10-stage flowchart on p. 5 of its report.
Would-be applicants start the process by establishing an account on a website called “Login.gov”, and then enter biographical information and submit a photograph using the CBP One app itself.
That CBP One app entry also captures “the device’s latitude and longitude to ensure the noncitizen was within the appropriate proximity to the U.S. border to schedule an appointment”, that is central and northern Mexico initially and on the Mexican side of the Guatemalan border today. If an appointment is available, the applicant can schedule a date to appear at the port.
According to the report, after the alien schedules that appointment, the CBP One information goes to CBP’s Automated Targeting System (ATS), which “compares traveler, cargo, and conveyance information against law enforcement, intelligence, and other enforcement data using risk-based scenarios and assessments”.
A function within ATS, “Unified Passenger” or “UPAX”, then automatically conducts pre-arrival vetting by comparing the information the applicant provides against “other data available to CBP, such as raw intelligence from DHS and other Government agencies”, creating a “Hotlist” for each port that documents upcoming appointments and vetting results.
CBP’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) has jurisdiction over the ports, and a temporary detachment from that directorate, the Southwest Border Operations Cell (SBOC), separately crafts something called the “CBP One Appointment Holders of Interest Report”.
That report notifies higher-level officials, including port directors, about any applicants expected to show up in the next 72 hours who may pose a national-security risk. So far, so good.
When those applicants show up on the day of the appointment, OFO officers confirm they are on the Hotlist, and those applicants are sent to primary inspections where officers take a second photograph before shipping them off to secondary inspection.
At secondary inspection, applicants are fingerprinted and the results are checked against the DHS Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) “for a criminal background check” and their DNA is collected and sent to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System for “processing”.
Secondary CBP officers then question the applicants and review the vetting results. If there is any derogatory information, it is confirmed with CBP’s National Targeting Center (NTC), which identifies security risks. Still good, at least on paper.
That description is how the process worked initially, but there were some minor tweaks to it along the way, including expanding the languages available for would-be applicants and moving from a “first-come, first-served appointment selection model to an algorithm-based appointment allocation mode”, which considers some older requests along with newer ones.
There are still glitches in those processes, but none are relevant to this analysis.
“CBP May Be Missing an Opportunity”. A major security issue was identified by OIG: CBP fails to use the biographic and biometric information applicants submit to CBP One “to identify suspicious trends as part of its pre-arrival vetting procedures”.
“Suspicious” is one way to put it. OIG analyzed that CBP data and concluded that nearly 209,000 of the just over 264,550 initial users (79 percent) gave the same intended address in the United States as at least one other user “despite appearing to be unrelated”.
It’s not that unusual for two unrelated people to share the same address, I guess, but OIG found seven specific U.S. addresses that nearly 1,700 different people had claimed as their intended destination. Plainly, somebody’s going to have to crash on the couch.
If that’s not sketchy enough, OIG noted that those nearly 1,700 aliens didn’t all enter through the same port, and one address (identified as “Address 1”) was claimed by 85 applicants who came through various ports, including Brownsville, Texas, (on the Gulf of Mexico) and 261 others who came through San Ysidro, Calif. (near the Pacific).
“Address 2” is identified as a “4-bedroom, single-family home”, but it was claimed as the intended U.S. destination by 358 aliens, 266 of whom had different last names. Combined, they had entered through all eight of the CBP One app interview scheme ports at the Southwest border. Because they used various different ports to enter, OFO failed to realize how many applicants were claiming the same address.
By the way, while OIG never gives a street address for that latter location, a map on p. 16 of the report suggests it’s near Sacramento, in northern California.
Despite that fact, 44 of the applicants who claimed Address 2 came through Brownsville, as did 38 others who entered through Hidalgo, which like Brownsville is in the Rio Grande Valley of southeastern Texas. Both San Ysidro and Calexico, Calif. (another CBP One port) are at least a thousand miles closer to Sacramento that either of those Texas ports, but apparently nobody at CBP in Texas paid much attention.
OIG notes applicants can change their intended addresses once they show up at the ports, but 83 percent of those suspicious addresses were the same address listed on the Notices to Appear applicants were given when they were released into the country — suggesting it was the same one they gave to the interviewing CBP officer.
If any of those applicants show up for court, I’d be surprised, but that aside, CBP can and should be comparing CBP One U.S. addresses to identify the ones being serially used. That said, this all raises the specter of fraud, and is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
CBP One “Processes Took Several Hours to Complete”. Curiously, OIG either overlooked or ignored a separate major issue that it alluded to in a footnote at the bottom of p. 5: “We observed CBP One™ appointment processing at the El Paso POE, and these processes took several hours to complete”.
POE, of course, is “port of entry”, and I have no doubt that the port processing the report describes takes “several hours” for each of the 1,450 aliens who show up daily at the eight CBP One ports (Brownsville; El Paso, Texas; Eagle Pass, Texas; Hidalgo; Laredo, Texas; Calexico; San Ysidro; and Nogales, Ariz.).
Each port has been up and running for decades, and they were intended solely for screening of legal travelers, plus a handful of inadmissible aliens and identified smugglers.
In FY 2021 (before the scheme went into effect), for example, CBP officers in OFO’s Laredo Field Office, which has jurisdiction over 10 separate ports (including Laredo, Brownsville, and Hidalgo) stopped 21,664 inadmissible aliens total, an average of just over 59 per day.
I’m unaware that any of those three ports has been expanded to accommodate, on average and individually, an additional 181 inadmissible CBP One applicants daily, and if they were, OIG never mentions it.
Note that officers deemed nearly 239,000 aliens inadmissible at the 10 Laredo Field Office ports in just the first 10 months of FY 2024 — an average of 1,126 aliens per day, more than 19 times as many as in FY 2021.
That means the interview scheme must be significantly taxing the resources available at the eight CBP one ports to screen legitimate traffic.
San Ysidro is the busiest land port in the Western Hemisphere, handling nearly 32 million passenger and pedestrian crossings each year, while El Paso is the second-busiest U.S. port (18 million-plus crossings), Laredo’s third (12 million annual crossings), Hidalgo’s fifth (almost 11 million annually), Calexico’s sixth (10.45 million crossings per year), and Brownsville lands in seventh place (10 million crossings annually).
Any impediment to lawful commerce at any of those ports will cost the economy untold millions, at least, but the scheme is by definition an impediment to screening and transit. Perhaps that wasn’t in OIG’s remit, but they may want to quantify some of those costs, or at least detail any disruptions.
“They've Never Been a Ripple in the Pond”. Then of course there’s the issue of vetting all those aliens.
I have no doubt ATS is a fine system, and that the folks at SBOC and NTC are dogged and diligent, but the fact that nearly 1,700 people used the same seven U.S. addresses and never got caught suggests there’s massive undetected fraud in the CBP One app interview scheme.
That fraud is itself a security risk, but the much bigger risk is that the vetting OIG describes is dependent on the intelligence the U.S. government has access to — which as any national-security expert will tell you isn’t much.
As then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress in 2015:
The only thing we can query is information that we have. So, if we have no information on someone, they've never crossed our radar screen, they've never been a ripple in the pond, there will be no record of them there and so it will be challenging.
When foreign nationals seek visas abroad — that is, “do it the right way” — U.S. consular officers can at least perform in-country investigations to see if there is any derogatory information on them.
Three of the top nationalities for CBP One users, however, are Venezuela, Cuba, and Haiti — the first two socialist dictatorships openly hostile to our interests with no interest in disclosing the misdeeds of their citizens to the U.S. government, and Haiti lacks any functioning government at all. Good luck finding any “ripples”, regardless of how many hours CBP One applicants spend in the ports.
Worse, as I recently explained, three Tajikistani nationals who utilized this scheme were allowed to enter the United States despite the fact that they were on the terror watchlist. All the flow charts and happy talk aren’t going to explain away that inconvenient truth.
Congress never authorized the CBP One app interview scheme, and given this report, it should at least examine the program further. Ports were meant for legitimate travelers, not some arbitrary number of “undocumented noncitizens” the administration wants to accommodate to elide the sorry facts about illegal immigration at the Southwest border. They should remain that way.